Tumors. Miscarriages. Cancer. Early graves.

Those became the common threads among American service members who worked at a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the 1980s.

The base was so secret that for most of that decade, the Pentagon would not admit what type of aircraft flew there. Even long after they left, few military personnel suspected the cause of their illnesses might lie in the ground where they once stood watch.

Now they are fighting the Department of Veterans Affairs for compensation, and they are fighting against time. Hundreds of those they served with have already died.

Dave Crete has been counting them. His memorial list now holds more than 600 names. 

Crete was 18 when he began guarding the F-117 Nighthawk at the Tonopah Test Range — one part of the Air Force’s massive 2.9 million-acre Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) which also includes the classified facility Area 51, a focal point of UFO and alien conspiracy theories.

The angular black F-117 jet was the world’s first operational stealth aircraft, built to slip past Soviet radar. It later led the opening strikes of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Crews flew in from Las Vegas for four days at a time, and the jet flew only at night. The Pentagon did not acknowledge it existed until 1988, five years after Crete arrived.

Crete, now 61, sells real estate in Las Vegas and runs The Invisible Enemy, a nonprofit that advocates for veterans who served at the remote testing and training range about halfway between Las Vegas and Reno.

No one told him, he says, that the desert beneath them held plutonium, left behind by nuclear weapons safety tests in 1963. Federal officials knew. They had already decided the risk was acceptable.

A 1975 environmental assessment of the range by a predecessor of the Energy Department, reviewed by MS NOW, concluded, “The environmental costs inherent in the work are small and reasonable for the benefits received.”

When the veterans later turned to the VA for help, they hit another wall. To protect the base’s secrecy, their service records had been “data masked.”

On paper, they were never there. 

The civilians who worked beside them fared better. A 2000 federal law compensates those Energy Department contractors. It does not cover members of the U.S. military.

Mike Whitaker arrived at Tonopah three years after Crete. Now 64, Whitaker is a retired Air Force master sergeant who served from 1980 to 2000, working as an aircraft electrician on the F-117.

The two men are among hundreds of veterans who served on the range and say they are living with the consequences.

Whitaker counts 54 colleagues he worked with directly who have died. “That’s a lot,” he said, “when you look at this small area.”

A bipartisan group of Nevada lawmakers has proposed legislation — named for Crete — that would require the Department of Defense to classify training sites where radiation and other toxic exposure occurred as “contaminated” so veterans can get the requisite care.

Crete did not connect his health to his service until 2015, at a barbecue that he and his wife hosted for former service members he had not seen in decades. According to Crete, six of the eight men there had tumors removed. Several of their wives had suffered repeated miscarriages.

“I’ve never had a conversation with anybody ever outside my doctor about tumors,” Crete said. “And now I’m sitting with eight guys and six of us have tumors.”

Whitaker came to the next barbecue. “Look at all these people getting sick,” Whitaker said. His own symptoms — sinus problems and pulmonary disease — had surfaced around 1996, but he had never linked them to his work.

Whitaker’s worst scare came in 2001, when he said his neck swelled so quickly that he thought his airway had been punctured. Doctors in Las Vegas found that his thyroid had failed. The first question the attending doctor asked, Whitaker said, was whether he had been exposed to radiation.

The Pentagon did not answer questions about why it has not acknowledged radiation exposure at the highly classified military range. Asked about its position on the legislation named for Crete, a spokesperson said in a statement, “As a matter of policy, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the Department to comment on proposed or pending legislation.”

The toll on exposed veterans is not limited to physical ailments. Whitaker has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and what his doctors call “nightmare terrors.”

Without records proving that they worked at the secret site, it can take decades for veterans like Whitaker and Crete to get disability benefits.

“The guy that cooked your cheeseburger, if he got sick, we’re going to take care of him,” Crete said. “But you, the guy that wears the fatigues to work every day, you’re screwed.”

In 2020, Crete found a 1975 assessment conducted by the Energy Research and Development Administration, which later became part of the U.S. Department of Energy. It described a 1963 test series, code-named Roller Coaster, which the U.S. government acknowledged resulted “in the dispersal of plutonium and contamination of surface soils in the surrounding area.”

The contamination was severe enough that the affected areas were fenced off, according to the government’s own assessment. When officials considered a full cleanup in 1970, the report showed, they chose instead to expand the fencing and study “the ecological dynamics of plutonium in the desert environment.”

Mark Hada, 56, a security specialist who arrived at Tonopah in 1987, worked the same four-days-on rotation as Crete and Whitaker, under a cover assignment at a base where he says he never actually reported.

Hada, now a retired police detective on Maui, filed for disability in 2023. The VA granted benefits for several conditions, including rhinitis and a benign parathyroid tumor, and accepted that he had been exposed to radiation at Tonopah, according to records compiled by his representative. In June 2025, the VA found him permanently and totally disabled, the records show.

But in June of this year, the VA reopened his closed file and began a review that could strip him of those benefits, Hada said. The move came soon after he submitted a buddy statement backing a fellow veteran’s radiation claim, which the VA had denied.

On Sept. 9, the VA sent new exam requests for seven of Hada’s conditions to a contract examiner, according to VA records reviewed by MS NOW.

The VA issued an order, which was reviewed by MS NOW, requiring fresh medical exams and instructing providers that radiation exposure “is not to be considered or mentioned” in the medical assessments.

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven said in a statement to MS NOW that the department “follows federal law regarding the criteria for presumptive conditions, presumptive locations and radiation-exposed Veterans, and the law does not list Area 51 or NTTR as presumptive radiation risk locations.”

“Veterans may still receive benefits for a service-connected condition without a presumptive designation,” Slaven said. “In these cases, VA evaluates claims on a case-by-case basis to establish a military service connection.”

When Hada called a VA hotline, he said, the representative told him the file should never have been reopened.

Hada said he has taken his complaint to the inspector general at the VA and to the White House, neither of which he said has responded. He received notice this week of a new exam scheduled for Oct. 2.

“President Trump cares deeply about our great veterans which is why his administration has eliminated the backlog of veteran families waiting for health care, processed a record number of VA disability claims, and opened dozens of health clinics for veterans across the country,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told MS NOW in a written statement.

Hada’s case is not an isolated one, according to Mark Ely, a fellow Tonopah veteran and VA-certified claims agent who represents Hada and other veterans with their claims pro bono.

Ely said that in his experience, the agency’s own systems and records suggest it knows which veterans were exposed — even as it denies their claims.

The underlying problem, Crete said, remains the “masked service” records. The Pentagon needs to sign off on decoding them, he said. 

Crete tracks the human cost one phone call at a time, adding each name to a memorial list he keeps. He recalled one widow in her 80s calling him to tell him about her husband: “He died. Now I’m going to lose my house.”

Crete’s own family has not been spared. He said he suffers from chronic bronchitis and tumors under his skin. His wife had three miscarriages, and his daughter’s baby now has an autoimmune condition.

Whitaker said his wife had seven miscarriages after he returned from the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Their only child was not born until 1993.

“It makes you wonder,” Whitaker said. “Did I bring anything home to her?”

Their hope now lies with Congress, which they hope can end the silence and give veterans their due.

“We’re not a second-class citizen military,” Crete said. “We know what we signed up for. We volunteered. We didn’t know we were signing up for this.”

What they want, even if lawmakers have to force it, is an acknowledgment from the Pentagon that the ground at the secret test site near Tonopah was contaminated. Federal scientists put that in writing in 1975.

“It is unconscionable that one U.S. government agency deems the range contaminated and their personnel exposed, while another U.S. government agency does not,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

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